Stepping back while stepping forward
A return to sports to help tell the stories of female athletes in Iowa
Mom always did know best.
It was several years back when I was sitting in my mom’s living room talking about something, probably the demise of newspapers, and worrying about being moved to a new position – again – when she said:
“I think you’ll go back to sports one day.”
No, I assured her, as much as I’d like to, I would not be going back to sports, a department in which I’d spent nearly 20 years at the Des Moines Register and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I was living in my Wisconsin hometown and working in Madison where I had had seven different jobs in 14 years, so I’m not sure which one I had at the moment of this conversation. I might have been an entertainment reporter, I might have been a business reporter, I might have been an assistant city editor. I might have been an ag reporter with a cheese beat because I did, after all, live in Wisconsin. I did fill in for the sports department sometimes, covering a basketball game here and there and I’d also freelance some.
But full time again? No way.
Sports, I told Mom, had changed too much. It had become all football all the time, or big-time college basketball. So many reporters and editors had been laid off and my joy had always come in finding the out-of-the-way stories, things that not everyone else was chasing. Women’s sports. Olympic sports. Pole vaulters and softball pitchers. The kinds of topics that don’t serve up the clickbait that digital media chases now.
But now there are options. New ways of telling stories. New kinds of stories that are finding audiences and sometimes even provide a little clickbait of their own.
So I’m back in sports. Sort of.
Welcome to The Crossover, which will offer a range of stories about girls’ and women’s sports in Iowa. It won’t be just Caitlin Clark and basketball, though there will be some of that because ’tis the season. It will be names you might not know but maybe should. It will be things that women’s sports fans in Iowa might find of interest.
The title? The crossover is a basketball move. You fake out your opponent and change direction. It was particularly effective in the Iowa six-player game where steps were limited; Jefferson and Drake star Kristi Kinne used it so effectively she was nicknamed “Kristi Crossover.”
But to me it’s also a metaphor for where women’s sports are now. They’re taking steps. They’re moving forward. They’re succeeding.
The rest of the world now knows what Iowans have known for more than a century — that female athletes can kick some serious butt and are a joy to watch.
Because of the success of Iowa women’s basketball and Caitlin Clark, it might seem like a lightning-in-a-bottle moment right now and in some ways it is. But we’re also in this moment because Iowa laid a foundation for it a long time ago. In other words, this has been a slow-brewing electrical storm that is now lighting up the skies well beyond Iowa.
There is the University of Iowa basketball success of course, last year’s national runners-up and filling arenas wherever they go around the country. That’s the easy brag for the Hawkeye State.
But Iowa coach Lisa Bluder, a Linn-Mar and Northern Iowa alum, is just one of a quartet of Iowa natives who lead the state’s Division I women’s basketball teams. Iowa State’s Bill Fennelly is from Davenport, Drake’s Allison Pohlman is from Wellsburg and Northern Iowa’s Tanya Warren is from Des Moines.
While we’re at it you can throw in Maryland’s Brenda Frese, who won an NCAA title in 2006, Georgia’s Katie Abrahamson-Henderson and Missouri’s Robin Pingeton. They’re all from Cedar Rapids. Then there’s Oklahoma, led by Jennie Baranczyk, a West Des Moines Dowling and Iowa alum; the ascendant Illinois, coached by Shauna Green of Clinton; and Creighton, currently ranked No. 22, coached by Jim Flanery of Guthrie Center.
Talk about punching above your weight.
It’s not just basketball where Iowa makes its mark. Iowa high school stars have dotted the rosters at some of the top volleyball schools in the country, including Nebraska, Wisconsin, Texas and Louisville. Iowans have continually headed to Northern Iowa, which has dominated the Missouri Valley Conference since well before the game scores only went to 15
And then there’s wrestling, new to the lineup of women’s sports but with the University of Iowa leading the way as the first Division I power school to offer the sport for women.
Still, this just scratches the surface. Women have so many ways to participate and build careers in sports now, in ways that were utterly unimaginable when Title IX became law in 1972.
As someone who benefited from all of that — first by sort of being an athlete, and then as a writer seeing it all unfold over the decades — it’s been exhilarating to have had a front-row seat to history.
That history continues to unfold, and Iowa and Iowans will continue to play the role they have always played.
That’s why I’m “back” in sports. There are stories to tell and I can’t wait to tell them.
Well, that and because Mom always did know best.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese And Basketball: Stories From A Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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We who live in Jefferson, Iowa, need to do something to commemorate being the place where Kristi Kinne developed, or maybe perfected, the “Kristi Crossover.” Every time I see some player in a high-level women's game today use that move, it makes me smile.
I’m on Team Burns now.